in the wrong light anyone can look like a darkness; any

[Dacia]

I can still hear you saying - 
you would never break the chain 

At first glance, she cannot believe that he’s real. Who could? He looks like something nightmarish, something only one of Beqanna’s famed and rather illusive magician’s could dream of. But as Dacia lies motionless, camouflaged with her gift, watching the inner workings of his body and seeing the breath of life that escapes him, she reasons he must be real. The red of iron, of blood, of muscle gives him some sense of color, like rust newly formed over steel. There are the splotches of white: of bone, sinew, fat. There, beginning just under his jaw and running together to form the fate’s eternal string of life is a thick, blue vein. Dacia dares not move; she’s too close to him anyhow, but her eyes watch the imperceptible flicker of that very vein for what seems like an eternity. So, he must be real.

He has wings. She wonders if he can fly? And then it hits her, the idea to simply stop her charade and ask him. So her chameleon skin adjusts, like a solitary wave running to shore, and where once there was what seemed like only the rush of dying grasses, now there is a mare cloaked in black from head to hoof. She rises from her resting position, front legs splaying first so that she can push herself upwards. Her hind legs feel numb, so she stretches her inky neck and shakes loose the tautness in her spine. Surely he sees her now, and their proximity to one another is shocking - if she wished it, Dacia could take a few steps forward and the two would be tangled together, but she blames herself for hiding so long.

Once she’s settled, she looks him over, noting the waste that lay in his own eyes. There was loss. Dacia knows this because she’s harboring that same, endless sense of loneliness. “Why do you cry?” She asks him, and the question implies that somehow he would know that she’s cried too. But he can’t know that, it’s impossible. And she guesses, of all horses, he would know of impossible things.

Dacia;

color-changing vixen of the chamber